Category: Uncategorized

I had a go at stitching my patchwork quilt the other night. It’s pretty old now. Dad gave it to me years ago. I spread it on my bed every year, around the time Dad died, because that’s when it starts getting nippy. Early October. I’ve been meaning to repair it for ages, not wanting…

For World Suicide Prevention Day. An extract from the book I’ve spent far too long writing, about my father’s suicide and life after it. It’s a chunk about going to visit him at Runwell Hospital, the ‘loony bin’ we all used to laugh about when we were cruel kids who knew nothing about sadness, which I…

Sitting on the bed just now, jumble-headed & waiting for my eyes to clear enough to get up for a wee, I looked down at my swollen tummy and really looked at it. What a change. I thought about the inner intricate whirrings & industrious processes, makings of a life that i can take no…

I told everyone I was pregnant yesterday. It wasn’t a prank or anything. It’s true. I’ve just been keeping it under my hat for 22 weeks. Well, it started under my hat then when it got a bit bigger I had to admit defeat and transfer it to my tum and honour the traditional gestational…

When Hugh Hefner died I rolled my eyes. I automatically pre-empted how many people (ok, mainly men) would bore me that day with strange grief for someone they never met, with misplaced respect, tedious jokes, and flimsy validation of a dubious man. How many male friends would make me sigh deeply with their throwaway laddishness…

I have been entrusted with the care of a fishtank for one week and already things have got out of hand in a deathy fashion. It was only two days ago that my mum and step-dad absconded like lusty teenagers to a caravan in Suffolk for their anniversary and I’m pulling my bloody hair out….

A friend just sent me a quote. It’s one of my favourites. Roald Dahl. “If a person has ugly thoughts it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it….

I need to grow up and get better shoes. You can’t traipse around London for three days solid in worn-out Converse and not expect your feet to hate you by the end of it. Those soles are thin at their best, when they’re new, but when you’ve worn them the equivalent of ten times round…